The Visiting Writer's Workshop: A Story

No more certain as to the whereabouts of his next meal than he was as to that of his
next novel, Ryder Hunter eagerly snatched at the two-week workshop in fiction writing at
the small former teachers college in a north Idaho milltown. It would pay five grand plus
expenses. He was not keen for workshops, but his novel was going nowhere, his
"mate," as he liked to call Carolyn (he admired the emerging Australian
writers), had left him for an associate prof in electrical engineering, and he needed the
bucks.

He much preferred reading gigs, a quick $200 or $500, quaff a few with the profs, grad
students and groupies at a local dive, then off into the sunset. He would always gear
himself up with one (no more) shot of J.D. and a good dinner—no gorging before a reading,
but no privation either. After the reading he would, as expected, throw all moderation to
the wind and drink himself into a profoundly deserved oblivion. By the next morning the
profs and students would have returned to their business, forgetting all about him and
leaving him to his own devices for getting out of town.

Sometimes he wondered what would happen if, instead of nursing a restorative breakfast
and then slipping past the city limits, he were to just hang around for a couple of days.
Suppose he were to drop in at Professor So-and-So's office, the guy who had been so
cordial the night of the reading, who had said it was one of the best, one of the very
best, who had bought the first round. Or suppose he were to look up the blonde grad
student whose bare leg had contacted his so warmly under the table at least a dozen times
that evening. He'd never done it. Somehow the rhythm of the event seemed always to require
that he exit the premises the day after.

He had run a few workshops before, had taught a couple years at a junior college after
receiving his M.F.A., so he had some credentials to back up his handful of published
stories and moderately successful, fairly well reviewed first novel. Still, he was a
little surprised to see this two-week stint come through, and he was very grateful. It
struck him that it could lead to something, a network of similar opportunities perhaps, so
he determined not to screw up. Not that he'd screwed up in the past, except maybe the one
bit in Ohio, but frankly he had forgiven himself on that. He had simply misread the woman
in the first place, and in the second place there was no way for him to have known she was
the department chairman's wife.

Fortunately, Hunter had come across an essay concerning nontransference in a recent
edition of the AWP Chronicle, and he had committed the post-Freudian lore of Dr. Robert
Langs to memory. Standing now at the mirror in his Best Western suite, he stared
thoughtfully at what he saw before him, a good-lucking sucker, he had to confess, inching
into his thirties, single and in good shape, and oozing integrity, warmth, genuine
concern, strength, and wisdom. It was a good combo. "Talent," he said aloud. He
would add talent to the list. He was modest enough, though. He would not say
"genius," after all. Add "hard work," too.

Some of Langs' advice was easy, much of it self-evident. It came with the contract,
came with the territory, like #5, "a defined fee." He kept coming back to that
one. Five thousand dollars for two weeks of not terribly taxing work, to be rounded off on
the second Friday by a public reading. The defined fee was good. He could live with that.
Also the limited number of students. He would have no more than fifteen, most of them
especially selected by the resident creative writing faculty, which fortunately consisted
of only a single writer, a poet of no significant reputation. The poet, whose name was
something odd that kept slipping his mind, had a haggard look about him. Ryder could
imagine him handling the increasing stream of creative writing students, from neophytes to
promising prospects for some M.F.A. program. He was probably immensely popular with the
students, genuinely committed to both his teaching and his own work, and totally neglected
by most of the lit staff.

"Time's a bitch," he said early in his first session.

He was supposed to meet the class five nights a week, a two-and-a-half hour block, in a
sterile and windowless classroom. He would be available at least two hours a day for
conferences. It was a crock.

"We'll work something out," he said.

"Cool," piped a girlish voice that came from a dim arc of the circle where
two or three sorority sweatshirts clustered. They all appeared to be tri-delts.

He intended to lay down the rules in the first session, keeping in mind as many of Dr.
Langs' valuable suggestions as he could, though feeling free to adapt them slightly to
meet the demands of the real world. It struck him that the good doctor had been a touch
too clinical. It struck him that what might go in seminar or in therapy might not work in
the harsh light of the writing work-shop. Best, then, to decode certain portions of Langs'
teaching frame. Life, after all, was not a dream.

"Attendance," he said next. "You've got to be here and you've got to
participate. No deadwood. Two absences and you're out. No excuses."

"I got a wedding I've got to go to on Thursday," blurted a punked out
brunette to his left. Her hair and make-up contrasted strikingly with her plaid cowgirl
shirt, tight bluejeans, and high-heeled shitkickers.

"Well," he sighed, "I guess that'll be okay. Just try not to miss any
more sessions."

"But I'll be gone Friday, too," she moaned.

"Okay. Grades." The class fell silent. "They say I gotta give
grades." Grumbles, groans. "No sweat. Everyone gets an A as long as they do the
work, come to class, get involved." The general buzzing resumed.

"Tests. No. Your responsibility is to turn out one pretty well finished story, and
of course to contribute your suggestions to others in the class. Any questions?"

"Mr. Hunter?" It was a large bearded man who looked to be about sixty.

"Ryder," he admonished. "Call me Ryder."

"Yeah, Ryder. Look, I'm hoping we can get into our writing here. Last time we had
a workshop this woman gets us reading all sorts of crap that didn't have nothing to do
with what I'm trying to work on, see? I mean I think this Alice Beattie or whatever, her
stuff's okay, but it don't speak to me, see? I got this bunch of stories about when I was
working for the Forest Service, see?"

It was not an easy night, but it was their opener, so Ryder Hunter felt justified in
wrapping up early. He collected a handful of manuscripts (apparently no one had informed
them they were to have a sample of their work on hand), and then he headed toward the
motel. He was not too surprised to see three of the graduate students sitting in the
Sagebrush Lounge by the time he got there. The tall sandy-haired fellow and the chunky
blonde were apparently an item. He had misgivings about the young woman with long dark
hair that fell in voluptuous waves around her nicely curved shoulders and ample breasts.
He discovered that he had been mentally writing her into his novel from the moment he saw
her in class. She wore a dark green dress of some flimsy sort of material that seemed
almost to be alive.

Inevitably he thought of #8: "The student-teacher relationship and interaction is
confined to the work of the class." He had underlined those very words in Langs'
article. The present situation did appear a bit compromising, but then the classroom was
not a clinic, after all, not a therapist's couch, "and not a temple either!"

"What?"

Ryder was surprised to recognize that he had actually uttered the last phrase aloud.
"The classroom," he said, clearing his throat, "is not a temple."
Everyone laughed and he ordered another round, instructing the waiter to put it on his
tab. Clearly #8 would have to be adapted.

By the third session, the workshop was running smoothly enough. They were
"into" one another's work, and most of the class members were experienced. They
knew the routine. It was that session, though, which was visited by the director of the
graduate program in English, unannounced. Ryder felt uncomfortable about it, but there was
nothing he could do. He'd met the director, whose name he had promptly forgotten, the
evening he arrived. In fact the graduate director had taken him to dinner that evening, so
a connection of sorts had been made. Besides, the guy was docile enough. He sat out of
sight in a corner of the room and took notes for a while, then began surreptitiously to
read a Kundera novel. He left at the break without saying a word, though he did seem to
nod his head as if to say that it all seemed shipshape.

"He always does that," one of the tri-delts said. It was either Chris, Mindy,
or Kris. He knew he would never be able to tell them apart, even when they dressed
differently.

Ryder was well aware that #2 had been breached, but he also knew that an old pal was
passing through on the twelfth, and he had already agreed to let him sit in that evening.
He had planned to cover up the incursion by introducing his friend as a writer himself,
which was true enough, though he wrote poetry.

The next night, which figured, Ryder told himself after it had blown over, the fourth
night, just long enough for everyone to start getting familiar, M.K. Osgood, the former
lumberjack and Forest Service worker, exploded. Ben, the tall, sandy-haired grad student,
said something innocuous enough about a passage in Osgood's story, which had to do with
shooting pheasant over a stubborn black lab, but M.K. took it personally. The old timber
tramp let loose a string of mother-cursing expletives that had the unusual effect, not of
eliciting an angry retort, but of dissolving the grad student to tears. It was awful.

It turned out that Ben's mother had died of cancer the preceding year. In the tremulous
hour that followed, virtually every member of the class divulged personal confidences that
made a shambles of ideal #3 if not of #6 as well. Ryder felt that the air definitely
needed clearing, so he suggested that they meet the next time not in the austere
cement-block confines of Classroom Building #214, but in the more intimate and convivial
setting of the Blue Butterfly Coffee Shop just off Main, and perhaps they could start at
three or so and run till whenever. It was going to be Friday anyhow, and that would be a
good way to wrap up the week. People could just leave whenever they had something on.

Back at his motel room, Ryder glanced over Langs' list of ideals for the teaching
frame, and he had to confess that he was surprised to see he had overlooked a couple of
items pertaining to #1. Even #9 would now be in jeopardy. But there was nothing he could
do about it now, except, of course, to make sure they all stuck to the task at hand.

Under the circumstances, of course, that proved impossible. After a few futile efforts
to get the workshop to focus on the manuscript on hand, Ryder gave up. Four people never
showed up, including Ben, whose story he had photocopied for discussion. Jeanie Hale, who
wore her striking green dress again, informed him that Ben was "blown away" and
might not come back. He was real sensitive, she said.

Ryder could not exactly account for how it was that the whole session gave way to his
own anecdotes about teaching and writing, wandering around the country, his hopes and
ambitions, his struggles to get into print, his high school football career, his useless
agent in New York, his now deceased relationship with Carolyn. It just happened. He
suspected that it had much to do with Jeanie and Fran, the two grad students, buying him
bottles of a rather potent Danish malt called Elephant. It went to his head with
astonishing speed.

"Let me pay for that," he objected when a third round of brews and an extra
large pizza suddenly appeared, but the remaining half dozen or so members of the workshop
would not hear of it.

Fortunately, he was able to excuse himself from the rest of the evening's festivities.
Some were headed to a movie and others to a party at Jeanie and Fran's. Jeanie was
vociferously disappointed at his withdrawal, but her urgency only convinced Ryder that his
decision was sound. Back at his motel, he soon found himself throwing up and then passing
out on his bed, which pitched and bobbed like a rubber raft on the high seas.

The next morning, in the cold clear light of Saturday, he assessed the damages. At
least #12 was still reasonably intact: "no physical contact between all
concerned." Of course Ben and Fran were an exception, but that had been going on
before he even got there. Also, he might have some hope of regaining lost ground,
particularly if he could reassert #7: "a clear definition of the role requirements of
teacher and student, without role reversal." They had come perilously close on this
score, but Hunter congratulated himself that he had said nothing directly on the issue,
though he did believe deeply in the premise that teachers learn from their students. Best
to leave that matter tacit, he told himself. And then, of course, there was good old #5,
"a defined fee, etc."

Without going into the gory details, perhaps it is sufficient to say that a quiet
tapping at his door that Saturday night was to mean the irrevocable undoing of ideals #8
and #12. He had decided to treat himself monkishly that night, to stay in his room with
his J.D. and whatever college football games came his way, but it was not to be. It was
that green dress.

The remaining week of the workshop was a blur of stories, passion, tears, revisions,
and confessions. Ryder Hunter felt himself beloved in a way. He felt he had influenced
these people and their work. Yet he could not help feeling, as he wound up his reading
that second Friday night before a small but enthusiastic audience of students herded in
from survey classes and a sprinkling of profs (not including the graduate director), that
indeed his integrity and wisdom could be called into question. He was satisfied, though,
that his warmth and genuine concern had been proven, and maybe even his strength.

The chairman had told him he'd heard great things about his residency, and at the
reception following the reading at a local bookstore, M. K. Osgood gripped his hand as if
he were setting a choker and thanked him for all he had done. Whatever that was, Ryder
thought. He said good-bye to the green dress later that night, and the next morning he ate
alone, putting down a considerable breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausages, and hash browns.
He felt that he might have a couple ideas for the novel, and in his coat pocket he
definitely had a check for five thousand dollars. The "defined fee" had been
paid.